


semper fidelis

by irene_addling



Category: Captain Marvel (2019)
Genre: Amnesia, Angst with a Happy Ending, F/F, Memory Loss
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-12
Updated: 2019-03-12
Packaged: 2019-11-15 22:54:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,536
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18082505
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/irene_addling/pseuds/irene_addling
Summary: Carol remembers, and tries to put together what she can't.





	semper fidelis

**Author's Note:**

> FYI: there’s no assault, but this fic does deal in a tricky gray area regarding sex and memories, as well as some mild self-harm. There are more specific warnings in the end notes, so please check them out if you think you might need them.

She remembers sex with Maria six months after she left Earth.

It’s in a dream, and when she wakes up on fire in a tiny spaceship bunk near Contraxia, Carol wants to believe that’s all it is. But dreams have never brought her pleasure. She lies in bed as the fog of sleep fades and stares at the ceiling, trying to make the details stick in her brain: how hard it had been to unzip Maria’s jeans, the song playing on the truck’s ancient radio, the buzz of the cicadas outside the cracked-open window. She thinks it was their first time, because it feels like a first time. Then, she realizes that any memory she got first would feel like their first time, and runs to the bathroom to throw up. 

That morning, making breakfast before Talos awakens, she accidentally-on-purpose cuts her thumb on a kitchen knife. She bleeds blue, and swallows another wave of nausea before tucking her thumb into a rag.

. . . . . . . . . .

Carol Danvers remembers being twelve years old, when she had her first crush on a girl.

Or maybe she doesn’t. She remembers Anna, a smiling softball teammate, two years older with her hair in two braids. She remembers her stomach fluttering when Anna cheered her on, remembers looking at Anna in the locker room. She only remembers each of those happening one time, but presumably if twelve-year-old Carol had a crush on this girl, she must have felt both more than once. So maybe that’s when it started, but Carol yearns to have an entire palette of memories to chose from, because when she just has these glimpses in isolation—one set of butterflies, one lingering touch—she feels unmoored, more adrift than the tide.

She cannot remember having feelings for any boys. She doesn’t know if that’s because she never had feelings for boys, or if there are boy-feelings in her memories, waiting to be found. That night, she goes flying instead of sleeping, and does corkscrews through a passing star.

. . . . . . . . . .

She remembers Yon-Rogg. 

They didn’t fuck often. Carol remembers seven, eight, maybe nine times, and this is the one set of memories she can fully rely on. It was always after dreams, always after a fight, and always when the fight still wouldn’t calm her down. Then, Yon-Rogg would take her, mostly in his bed but sometimes on the gym mat, if he couldn’t wait. He was always on top, always rough, always possessive. Carol thinks she enjoyed it, but maybe she just enjoyed the thrill of being fucked by her commander, being chosen, being special. The funny thing about when you wake up unable to remember your own name is that you tend to cling to the first person who makes you feel important.

It feels odd, that they only fucked nine times, because Yon-Rogg always looked at her like he owned her. But even before she hated him, Carol kept her distance. Enough people had already laid claim.

. . . . . . . . . . .

Nine months after she left Earth, she’s digging through a scrapyard of relics from C-53, and finds a memory in an old book.

 _“—as if we haven’t been around since the nineteen-forties,” Maria says_ (bookstore, they’re in a bookstore, they’re in a bookstore looking at this book with the colorful shield on the cover and Maria is whispering like they’re criminals) _“Look at these fools,”_ (there’s a brunette man and a big tall blonde one and the brunette is looking at the blonde like he’s the center of his world) _“it was right under the military’s damn noses.”_ (they’re in a bookstore and they’re smiling and Monica is with her grandparents for the afternoon and is this an outing? is this a date? what is this what is this what)—

 _“I’m Cap, right?” Memory-Carol jokes,_ and the memory fades out on Monica’s laugh, slipping through Carol’s fingers. 

Talos finds her in the junkyard, crying on her knees, and his wife tucks her in while he flies to the next planet.

. . . . . . . . . .

When she’d shot the engine, there had been a photo of her and Maria in her jacket pocket. Carol doesn’t remember carrying it, but she finds it there, singed at the edges. It’s a friendly picture. They could be friends in it. They also could be not. 

Carol wonders if Yon-Rogg found it, when he’d stripped off her jacket to dress her in Kree fatigues, if he knew what he was stealing her from, if he figured it out, if he cared—

Either way, he’d left it. It was still there.

. . . . . . . . . .

She misses Maria. She’s not sure how you can miss someone you barely remember twenty-four hours with, but she does. She goes to seedy spaceport bar after seedy spaceport bar, and watches beings of all shapes, sizes and species dance and laugh, and her heart hurts. 

Some days, she thinks she’d give a kidney to remember the details of their nights out: the flavor of the beer she drank, the music on the jukebox, the color of Maria’s flannel. Other days, she remembers the cicadas, and figures she has enough.

. . . . . . . . . .

She cuts her arm on Xandar. She cuts her thigh on Nowhere. She cuts her stomach on a strange, rocky planet she never got the name of. It’s always blue, and she’s always sick afterwards. She wraps the wounds in gauze and keeps moving.

. . . . . . . . . .

She thinks, inanely, of calling Monica. _Hey, Lieutenant Trouble. Do you remember anything about your mom and I? Did we used to hold hands? Hug too often? Sneak upstairs?_ But calling Monica would mean calling Maria, because Monica’s eleven and barely old enough to use the house phone on her own, and Carol’s not ready to talk to Maria yet.

Plus, Monica would probably talk to Maria about it, and making a child be your messenger—even if it’s a child Carol is pretty sure she once considered her own—is the coward’s way out. Carol doesn’t want to be a coward, not anymore than she already is.

. . . . . . . . . .

She tells Talos and his family that she needs to run an errand for forty-eight hours and drops them off on a scenic planet with a stack of credits. Then, she guns it to the most remote corner of the galaxy she knows of that still has medical care.

“I need a blood transfusion,” she says to the confused alien at the front desk. This place has Terran medical care, she’s pretty sure. She hopes. “Full-body. I need it all gone.”

“Oh, dear. What were you contaminated by?”

“Kree.”

The alien’s face goes blank with terror.

She leaves without losing a drop.

. . . . . . . . . .

Maria’s jeans had a brass zipper, and Carol nearly broke a nail in her haste to get them unzipped. The song on the radio was Whitney Houston’s “I Wanna Dance With Somebody”. The cicadas were loud. Sometimes, Carol repeats these things to herself in the dark.

(She hasn’t gotten any more memories yet. She’s terrified of them, but sometimes when she wakes up without them, she cries.)

. . . . . . . . . .

She wonders, sometimes, if the reason Yon-Rogg fucked her so rarely is that he was already inside her: his blood was pumping through her body, binding her to him from the inside out.

. . . . . . . . . . .

She wakes one morning to find that Talos has set course for Earth.

“We’ve been finding…stains, around the ship,” he murmurs quietly. “Blue.”

“Talos…”

“It’s alright, Captain.” Talos always calls her Captain: even now, when he perhaps has the best reason to call her Carol. Some might call it overly formal, but Carol knows better. It’s a sign that he trusts her. “But we all need a home. Perhaps you need some time in yours.”

Carol doesn’t cry, but for the first time since her memories woke her, she sleeps through the night.

. . . . . . . . . . .

Dinner at Maria and Monica’s is normal, until Carol accidentally-on-purpose cuts her thumb with the bread knife.

In the bathroom upstairs, Maria disinfects the wound and closes it up with a Spice Girls bandaid; when Carol starts to ask what the Spice Girls are, she mutters a quiet “don’t start”, and Monica giggles and turns up the radio down the hall. She’s talking about songs and albums and tour groups, but suddenly Carol isn’t paying attention, because Maria’s touching her arm.

The rocky planet. Nowhere. Contraxia. Xandar. The scars are all under Maria’s fingers, and Carol realizes, suddenly, just how long it has been since someone has touched her.

“I—Maria—“

Maria grabs another pack of Band-Aids.

“We’ll get you cleaned up,” Maria says, determined. “It’ll be alright. It’s just blood.”

Carol thinks of _music jean zipper cicadas,_ and then she sits back to let Maria take care of her, and lets her body remember what her mind refuses to.

. . . . . . . . . .

Her and Maria sit on the porch long after Monica has gone to bed. Maria’s jeans have a button-up fly, and the music got turned off hours ago.

“I think I know what we used to be,” Carol whispers into the Louisiana night, cicadas buzzing in the sky. “But my memories, they’re—I can’t—“

“Shh,” Maria soothes. She takes Carol’s hand. She holds her face. 

It’s like coming home. 

“It’s alright, Carol.” She leans in for a kiss. “We’ll make new ones.”

**Author's Note:**

> Warning notes: Carol is missing a lot of memories regarding sex and sexuality, and has trouble figuring which memories were consensual, especially in regards to Yon-Rogg (she recalls sex post-crash that she definitely would not have consented to if she remembered her past). She ends the fic in a much better place, but ultimately doesn’t get most of them back. She also has serious issues with Yon-Rogg’s blood being in her, and cuts herself to check on it.


End file.
